Do the nueva trucks trans- form those borders or merely reify them?
(however briefly), the trucks help bring hidden social patterns into greater relief.
For example, by design, many loncheras seek out customers otherwise underserved by existing foodways, bringing into the open the voids and gaps in food distribution.6 In other cases, the proximity of loncheras to brick-and- mortar restaurants has led to protracted battles between the trucks and fixed businesses, politicians, and the police, highlighting the contested relationships between public space and private enterprise, culinary practices and municipal laws.7 Certainly, in a city as food obsessed as Los Angeles, loncheras are one of the most prominent examples of an “authentic” street cuisine, empowering socially and culturally mobile “foodies” with a sense of one-upmanship that comes with claiming to know where the best taco trucks in the city are.8 As foodways scholar Allison Caldwell describes them, food trucks have become “traveling containers of cultural capital.”9
Loncheras are so omnipresent that Kane argues they have attained a certain kind of invisibility through overfamiliarity: “The average resident will pass several taco trucks over the course of a day, but their ubiquity hides them in the everyday life of the city.”10 That may have been true once, but not since 2009, when a wave of so-called luxe loncheras emerged in the city, led by the Asian American venture Kogi BBQ-to-Go.11
“LA in a Single Bite”
Kogi began operating in November 2008, the brain child of Filipino Ameri- can Mark Manguera, Korean American Caroline Shin-Manguera, and Korean American chef Roy Choi. Launched with a Korean-inspired short rib taco, Kogi initially struggled until the social media specialist Mike Prasad came aboard and suggested that they use the Twitter platform to reach out to poten- tial customers, especially to update the truck’s locations.12
As the most prominent of the new, haute-meets-street cuisine trucks (nueva trucks), Kogi behaved much like a hybrid lonchera. Although its constant movement resembled that of transient trucks, its desire to cultivate a brand memory was more akin to that of a semipermanent truck. Social media tech- nology made this dual strategy possible. Kogi customers could either visit the company’s website (http://kogibbq.com) or subscribe to its Twitter feed (http:// twitter.com/kogibbq) to determine where and when the truck would appear. Especially in its early days, when Kogi had one lone truck rolling across the city, tracking it down became “like a treasure hunt,” according to Kogi’s public relations chief, Alice Shin.13
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In hindsight, Kogi’s strategy was a perfect trifecta of media catnip, combin- ing cutting-edge cuisine, technology, and culture angles. As I suggested, “The Kogi storyline wrote itself: inexpensive, ethnic fusion street food with a hip, technorati twist.”14
It also did not hurt that its short rib taco was, in the words of one customer quoted by the New York Times, “this Korean Mexican fusion thing of crazy deliciousness.”15 The taco begins with a griddle-warmed corn tortilla, on which are heaped finely chopped pieces of soy-sesame marinated beef short rib that would not be out of place in dozens of Korean BBQ restaurants in town. Add to that a sesame-chili salsa roja and a lettuce-and-cabbage slaw with chili-soy vinaigrette, all of which is garnished with a cilantro onion relish (see http:// kogibbq.com/category/menu). The result is a brilliant, unexpected contrast in flavors, a sweet/salty/spicy/sour combination that fits in your hand.
This was the other story that wrote itself: how Kogi’s mélange of flavors reflected Los Angeles’s larger social/cultural mixtures. As Roy Choi told News- week, “These cultures—Mexican and Korean—really form the foundation of this city. Kogi is my representation of LA in a single bite.”16 Those sentiments were echoed by others, most notably the Pulitzer Prize–winning Los Angeles Times food critic, Jonathan Gold, who described the short rib taco as “unmis- takably from Los Angeles, food that makes you feel plugged into the rhythms of the city just by eating it.”17
The impact of these trucks goes beyond just representation. According to New York City Food Truck Association president David Weber, “Food trucks activate public space.”18 One example that comes to mind is from my second trip to Kogi in the spring of 2009, an impromptu, late-night stop in down- town Los Angeles, outside the Golden Gopher Bar. The line was easily thirty to forty people, and as I waited, I eavesdropped on and interacted with fellow customers. The two men in front of me were two twenty-something African American men, both working in marketing. Ahead of them was a pair of for- ty-something white gay men, and behind me, I noticed a pair of twenty-some- thing Asian American women, each holding a small lap dog in her arms. I later wrote about that experience, noting:
I couldn’t remember ever spending even 15 minutes on an L.A. sidewalk talking and mingling with complete strangers, let alone downtown at 10 p.m. I could appreciate [Los Angeles Times’s] Jessica Gelt’s idealism when she described Kogi . . . as “a sort of roving party, bringing people to neighborhoods they might not normally go to, and allowing for interactions with strangers they might not otherwise talk to.”19 It’s tempting to see Kogi as powering a tech-driven,
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heteropolitan form of sidewalk contact, forging, in urban planner Jane Jacobs’s words, “a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust.”20
Lest this wave of urban utopianism—fueled by short rib satiety—go too far, however, I should note that in Jane Jacobs’s time, there was not the same kind of virtual panopticon of electronic surveillance watching over the sidewalk (however incompetently).21 Likewise, as Kristin Day points out, even in the supposedly “safe” streets of Irvine, California (a popular Kogi destination), the intermingling of racialized and gendered bodies can produce an aura of fear that challenges the ideal of a neutral public space.22
Especially interesting to consider is how nueva trucks like Kogi fit into a larger history of Los Angeles’s city-planning schemes that seek to create an idealized “urban experience,” but in highly privatized terms and on literally private grounds. An example is CityWalk by Universal Studios, a pioneering outdoor mall design with a faux urban decor that serves as a Vegas-like sim- ulacrum of a Manhattan-style “city street,” but one that is completely private and highly surveilled.23 Part of food trucks’ draw lies precisely in their signifier of “urban-ness,” not to mention culinary urbanity. Especially in Los Angeles, with its long-standing rivalries with more classically conventional cities like San Francisco and New York, there is a deep attraction to the nueva trucks’ ability to “activate public space.” As I discuss later, which public spaces the trucks choose to “activate” have meaningful implications for existing inequi- ties in space, especially along class and race lines. Do the nueva trucks trans- form those borders or merely reify them?
These concerns intersect with a long history in Los Angeles of what has been described as “multicultural triumphalism.”24 Celebratory descriptions of Kogi-as-LA recall Lisa Lowe’s warnings that while “multiculturalism claims to register the increasing diversity of populations, it precisely obscures the ways in which that aesthetic representation is not an analogue for the material posi- tions, means, or resources of those populations.”25 What we have seen with the championing of nueva trucks and their fusion fare is that the Korean taco can become a potent symbol of a city’s embrace of diversity: “the only-in-L.A. combination of two of the city’s most beloved ethnic cuisines,” as Jessica Gelt wrote.26 Yet, harmony between flavors can belie the often discordant reality of urban social relations.
In this regard, I agree with the general notion that Kogi can represent “L.A. in a single bite,” only it is a far more complex and fragmented Los Angeles than is often acknowledged. Jonathan Gold contends that “Kogi represents mobility
Oliver Wang
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in a city that worships mobility; it is a vehicle for traversing lines of race, class and ethnicity,” and I would add that it defines the borders in addition to cross- ing them.27
Just as loncheras reveal the hidden social structures and forces that flow through the city, I suggest that the nueva trucks, led by Kogi, also offer a way to confront the heterogeneity of Los Angeles, where diversity and inequality alike leave their mark on the city’s cartography.